©Kris Gerbrandt
Chapter 16:59-63 (ESV) - “For thus says the Lord God: I will deal with you as you have done, you who have despised the oath in breaking the covenant, yet I will remember my covenant with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish for you an everlasting covenant. Then you will remember your ways and be ashamed when you take your sisters, both your elder and your younger, and I give them to you as daughters, but not on account of the covenant with you. I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall know that I am the Lord, that you may remember and be confounded, and never open your mouth again because of your shame, when I atone for you for all that you have done, declares the Lord God.”
Question to consider: Which covenant of Israel’s youth did God promise to remember?
Israel was chosen by God to be the line in which the Messiah would come. She received the Law from God and was blessed beyond measure. Rather than being a blessing to the world and teaching the nations to turn to God for mercy, she split her allegiance between God and the world by accepting their idols. Despite decades of warnings to repent and turn back to the God who loved her, she refused to listen and would be stripped bare and lose everything by the hand of the very nations to which she gave herself.
Before the covenant with Moses, God had made a covenant with Abraham which could not be broken because God alone walked between the animal pieces (see my study on Genesis 15:7-21). God remembered this promise to Abraham while Israel was still developing as a nation during their captivity in Egypt— the days of her youth. He freed her from captivity and gave her the land of Canaan. Even though Israel broke the covenant God made through Moses, God’s remembrance of the promise to Abraham caused Him to establish the everlasting covenant in Christ. The apostle Paul proved this in his letter to the Galatians (see my study on Galatians 3), “Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, ‘And to offsprings,’ referring to many, but referring to one, ‘And to your offspring,’ who is Christ. This is what I mean: the law, which came 430 years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void. For if the inheritance comes by the law, it no longer comes by promise; but God gave it to Abraham by a promise.” (Galatians 3:16-18)
In this everlasting covenant, Christ would atone for the sins of all the nations so that even the likes of Samaria and Gentile nations like Sodom would become daughters of God. The shame of Israel in which the Lord would atone for all that she had done was put on Christ as He was nailed to the cross. For those who rejected their Messiah, God’s wrath was poured out on Jerusalem in the complete destruction of the temple by the Romans in 70 AD. By saying Israel would “never open her mouth again,” I believe God was saying that the temple would never again be rebuilt, and Israel’s prophets would be silenced. As the writer of Hebrews would proclaim, “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.” (Hebrews 1:1-2)
As difficult as the news was for Israel to never again be restored to her former glory, it is a wonderful blessing to know that God would establish a covenant to atone for the sins of the world.
Dear Lord, thank You for bearing our shame on the cross. May we put our trust in You and receive the free gift of Your righteousness so that we may be sons and daughters of God. Amen.